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The Impact of New Media on Peacebuilding and Conflict Management

New media tools such as smartphones can help hold governments accountable and coordinate relief efforts, for example, but they can also convey inaccurate information and promote violent agendas. This study guide examines both the positive and negative effects of the new media and its potential for use in peacebuilding.

This study guide series is designed to serve independent learners who want to find out more about international conflict and its resolution, as well as educators who want to introduce specifics topics in their courses. The main text of each guide briefly discusses the most important issues concerning the topic at hand, especially those issues that are related to the critical task of managing conflicts and building international peace.

Features of the study guide include:

Main text that discusses the positive and negative effects of the new media and its potential for use in peacebuilding.

One-third of today’s generation of youth—those ages ten to twenty-four—live in fragile or conflicted countries and are susceptible to the sway of ideological narratives of violent extremism. Evidence suggests, however, that they also play active and valuable roles as agents of positive and constructive change.

The students from Gardiner, Montana’s high school didn’t have much experience in the world beyond “little towns among farmland,” as one of them put it. So, when the mayor of the state capital, Helena, spoke to them as a 1994 refugee from Liberia’s civil war, the link between distant conflict zones and pastoral Montana took on a captivating human form.

The prisoners would be arriving soon and Adriana Combita, like a young teacher preparing to greet a new class, was nervous. This was not the first time that Combita, 26, had led a peacebuilding training with soldiers convicted of war-related crimes. But these were senior officers, commanders with master’s degrees, military officials who had lived abroad.